Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part II

This is much weaker, but I think the argument is still clear enough.

Of course, in central respects, this proposal calls for a revival of a project that dominated Christian historical writing from Eusebius to the Enlightenment. For Christian theologians and historians, all of human history was enclosed in a Christian frame. Augustine?s two-city scheme encompassed not only the ?sacred history,?Ethe whole history of man, and he, with many others, employed the six days of creation as another scheme for understanding the sequence of historical periods. Others preferred to structure their chronicles of ancient history according to the visions of Daniel, and the widespread use of the ?euhemerist?Etheory incorporated even the pagan gods and their exploits into a universal Christian history. One specific sign of the triumph of Christian historiography is evident in the proposal, first advanced by Melito of Sardis in the second century that ?God had created the empire for Christianity?s support.?EThroughout the middle ages, chroniclers continued to write history in this vein.

Despite variations in periodization and method, these Christian historians shared two main theological assumptions. First, they all believed that there was actually a single humanity that could serve as an object of universal history, operating on the biblical assumption that God had made from one blood all nations of the earth (Acts 17:26). Second, the historians believed that the history of this single humanity could be told as a single narrative, with its catastrophic beginning with Adam, its center in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, and its end in the return of Jesus to judge the living and the dead. Already in the second century, Irenaeus?Etreatment of redemptive history had combined these two themes, and made them central to his conception of redemption through recapitulation. He claimed that the history of Adam and Israel foreshadowed Jesus, who recapitulated it, and he extended this beyond Israel?s history to the history of man. Jesus had passed through all ages and conditions of humanity in order to redeem it. Irenaeus?Escheme told human history as a Bildungsroman, in which humanity grew from childhood in Adam to maturity in Christ. As Breisach puts it, ?The progress from the Old to the New Testament demonstrated a divine education of mankind ?Efrom the period of infancy in which Adam failed and elicited God?s discipline to that of Christ (the new Adam), who made possible a greater maturity for all. In that sense Irenaeus spoke of revelation, up to the Incarnation, as gradual process.?E

These assumptions continued to dominate Christian history writing well into the early modern period. As late as the 1681, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin and later bishop of Meaux, was able to write a Discours sur l?histoire universelle , in which he explained that

This kind of universal history is to the history of every country and of every people what a world map is to particular maps. In a particular map you see all the details of a kingdom or a province as such. But a general map teaches you to place these parts of the world in their context; you see what Paris or the Ile-de-France is in the kingdom, what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the world. In the same manner, particular histories show the sequence of events that have occurred in a nation in all their detail. But in order to understand everything, we must know what connection that history might have with others; and that can be done by a condensation in which we can perceive, as in one glance, the entire sequence of time. Such a condensation, Monseigneur, will afford you a grand view (4).

Bossuet “started with Adam and quickly moved through the epochs of Noah, Abraham, Moses; continued with the fall of Troy, Solomon, Romulus, Cyrus, Scipio, and arrived in due time at the ?last age of the world.?EThe last age began with the birth of Jesus Christ in the year 1 A.D. and encompassed the epochs of Constantine, Charlemagne, and Louis XIV. The bishop?s history of the world emerged not from secular darkness but from the Lord’s almighty linguistic workshop. ‘The first epoch begins with a grand spectacle: God creating heaven and earth through his word and making man in his image (1 A.M., 4004 B.C.). This is where Moses, the first historian, the most sublime philosopher, and the wisest of legislators, begins.’” Bossuet believed that history began in 4004 B.C., and thus his universal history ?covered exactly 5,685 years (4,004 plus 1,681).?E

Like the historians of the patristic and medieval period, Bossuet divided history according to epochs of redemptive history, neatly folding Roman and Carolingian history into the mix:

Adam, or the Creation
Noah, or the Flood
The Calling of Abraham, or the Beginning of the Covenant between God and Man
Moses, or the Written Law
The Fall of Troy
Solomon, or the Foundation of the Temple
Romulus, or the Building of Rome
Cyrus, or the Deliverance of the Chosen People from the Babylonian Captivity
Scipio, or the Fall of Carthage
The Birth of Jesus
Constantine, or the Peace of the Church
Charlemagne, or the Establishment of the New Empire

Events, however, had already begun challenge the traditional Christian historiography. Discovery of the Americas and the growing recognition that Christendom was a small outpost on a vast globe challenged Christian historians whose focus had been on the Mediterranean world and Northern Europe. As Breisach puts it,

After 1500, the very core of Christian universal history in the manner of Eusebius and Jerome, marked by the subordination of all histories to sacred history, was increasingly threatened. While certain bothersome chronological problems were amenable to technical solutions, the discovery of the global world and its many people was another matter. Christian historians had mastered similar problems when they had helped to integrate the Germans into the Roman world and during the Middle Ages had played a significant role in interpreting the enlargement of Latin Christendom eastwards. Yet the global world posed problems of greater scope and profundity. Those who decided simply to separate sacred from mundane history experience even more severe difficulties in finding a proper way to write universal history. Searching for the principle of unity, they tried geography, cycles, comparative analysis of nations, and even unity as an ideal for the future.

In an effort to ?save?Esacred history (similar to Kant?s later effort to save faith from the corrosive effects of reason), Jean Bodin suggested that there were in fact three kinds of history, human, natural, and divine. Importantly, for Boden, ?each of these histories has its own purpose and delivered knowledge of a different degree of certainty.?E

Along with such ?accidental?Echallenges to the Christian version of universal history came direct and explicit challenges first from Renaissance and then, more stridently, from Enlightenment historians. In place of Christian schemes of history, Petrarch suggested that Western history had three ages: The glories of Rome, the darkness of the Christians ages, and then the renovation of the Renaissance. As Breisach says,

It was a textbook writer, not a visionary or theoretician, who finally organized Western history according to the new concept of the three stages. Just prior to 1700 Christopher Cellarius published his Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, and New Period . Probably neither he nor his students grasped the full impact of the change: the universal history in the manner of Eusebius and Jerome had ended; Christian history had become a mere aspect of general history; biblical history appeared as just one feature of ancient history; and the continuity between the three periods was ended.

This is not to say that universal history was abandoned. On the contrary, various other schemes came into prominence. One trick was to recognize the diversity and breadth of human history, the relativity of various cultural conditions, and yet to hold fast to the superiority of the West. This was the approach of Voltaire:

In his Essay on the Manners, Customs and the Spirit of Nations (1754), Voltaire formulated the cultural interpretation of history precisely and elegantly. After sympathetically treating the Chinese, Indian, Persian, and Islamic civilizations, he nevertheless held fast to a universal human progress, thereby affirming, for him, the obvious contemporary superiority of the West . . . . Westerners differed from the Chinese, Africans, or Indians not intrinsically but solely because of the greater progress of their rationality; the lag was caused by the irrational forces still gripping the other societies, above all by oppressive religions, laws, and customs . . . . if, as Voltaire and some others maintained, the majority of people might never become fully rational in thought and behavior, those who were fully civilized could design good laws and offer good government for the masses.

In short, when all the dark peoples of the earth become fully rational, they will act and speak and think as French philosophes .